18-year-old Elexis Braswell, soda jerk at the Irwin-Potter Soda Fountain, with her first tattoo the fish symbol and Phil 4:13. Philippians 4:13, I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me. The fish symbol In the early days of Christianity, and at other times throughout history, Christians were persecuted or put to death for following their faith and Jesus Christ as their Savior. If they worshipped in secret places, a fish symbol outside the door was a way for other believers to know where they could worship and meet with other Christians. ( Joe Amon, The Denver Post)

Lent was the final testing ground and process for bringing fresh blood into the community while martyr blood still spilled in the emperor’s amphitheatre. And Lent solved a crucial conundrum — how do you reconcile sinners who had committed apostasy back into communion?

The story I’m telling is a composite from numerous early sources. I first heard it from my master teacher at Notre Dame, Father Aidan Kavanagh. The brilliance is his, the mistakes are mine. The evidence for the story spans the first Christian centuries, with the baptism part developing first to third centuries, the reconciliation part a bit later. It is the story of Euphemius.

He was a teenage street kid, son of a freed slave and permanently on his own. He picked up scrap work where he could, grifted a bit, had quick hands around a fruit cart, and on this cool Roman night was warming himself at a makeshift streetcorner fire. An older guy he hadn’t seen before joined the circle, and talk moved from girls and grub to subversive talk about some Jesus of Nazareth about whom astounding claims were made. The guy offered Euphemius a place to crash and a hot meal if ever he needed one, but he was wise enough to avoid that trap. You just never knew about strangers.

But a couple weeks later a cold rain made the shelter offer too tempting, and he showed up at the suggested house. There was warm food and a dry bed. The next morning he broke bread with the householder and his staff, and sat silently while they prayed then talked about this Jesus. Intriguing ideas, compelling story. They said to come back.

He did, eventually regularly, and got a part-time gig in a shop in the house/shop complex. He heard more about Jesus and the rather preposterous claims they made about him. There was a whole hidden community of these folks, and Euphemius wasn’t the only dude drawn to the exotic story and secret connected life. He continued for almost three years to rub against the life of these folks who called themselves Christians. They took care of their own, and beyond their own. And they were hunted for being pagans and atheists, because they didn’t believe Caesar Augustus was not only emperor, but god. Everybody in Rome knew that! He was on coins and everything.

After the three years, Euphemius was invited to become a Christian in a more formal way. He thought hard about it, even prayed as he had learned, and said yes. It was a genuine alternative to the way he’d been living. It was kind of exciting and felt like home. It was dangerous, yes, but … well, “yes.” So now he entered onto a more formal and intense preparation with others, each of whom had a catechist assigned to them. This time is what we later would come to know as Lent, although Euphemius didn’t need to know that. He would meet daily with his catechist to pore over Jewish scriptures, and the early writings of the community about Jesus. There were Paul’s letters, and the gospels.

Weekly he attended a prayer service at which the bishop presided. He liked the old guy, a respect, if grizzly, figure, and listened to his musings after readings. After the sermon, the catechumens, for that’s what Euphemius and his cohort were called, were politely but firmly dismissed from the service, which would go on without them. Euphemius met with his catechist and the others. People began to refer to them as “the Enlightened Ones,” the Illuminati. Usually the bishop dropped by to talk out the readings, how the community was trying to live them out.

Sometimes on his way in and out of the service, Euphemius noted people parked by the door, with ashes on their heads begging for prayers. “Sinners,” his catechist said, “with only three sins — murder, adultery and apostasy — it’s going to be tough for them to find their way back.” Euphemius worried some times when walking home, passing the amphitheatre, he heard the crowds — and the wild beasts — roaring. Someday they may be singing his song. There were costs to choosing this Christian crowd and life.

SIMFEROPOL, UKRAINE – Household items are viewed for sale in a market in the Crimean city of Simferopol on March 6, 2014. As the standoff between the Russian military and Ukrainian forces continues in Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, world leaders are pushing for a diplomatic solution to the escalating situation. The United Nations reports that the poverty rate in Ukraine is now at around 25%, with a falling population in recent years due to both a low fertility rate and migration to other parts of Europe and America. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

A message from Father Andre Mahanna, pastor of St. Rafka Maronite Church in Lakewood:

We begin Lent, the Season of the Great Fasting.

This year, Pope Francis’ Lenten message was entitled, “An Important Distinction Between Poverty and Misery.”

The Holy Father talks about the Christian vision of poverty, that is
the poverty of Christ. Christian poverty is not one and the same with
world view of poverty — the lack of material goods.

Christ left the richness of heaven to come on earth, and by
sharing our poverty He enriched us with the gifts of heaven.

The Church, like Christ, is called “The Poor Church for the Poor Ones.”
In fact, the Church is called to live the life of poverty and to help people
better share the gifts of God on a more equal basis through charity.
Like Christ, we are to bring hope to the brokenhearted.

The mission of the Church is to annihilate misery, which is a vice,
a burden that evil has laid on the shoulders of humanity.

With Christ, the Church teaches us to see the positive side of poverty.
In this regard, poverty is a virtue that enables Christians to store
their treasures in heaven, and to deal with earthly richness as stewards
and servers, and not as owners and masters of the world.

Christians help distribute the riches that God gave us on earth. In this way, poverty is
an evangelical virtue, and consequently it is not poverty that the world should fight,
but it is misery we should end.

The Holy Father says there are three types of misery: material,
moral and spiritual.

Material misery is an attack against the human dignity of the person. Since Christ’s time
and the first Christian community, the Church with the Apostles, established the ministry
of the Diaconia, or deacons, to eliminate the peril of this material misery by teaching
the sharing of material goods, by giving to each according to his or her need,
and by serving widows and orphans.

Moral misery, on the other hand, is the misconception of the personal right
of ownership and the manipulation of material goods to create a separation among
societies on the basis of individual and national income. It is when humans
become the slaves of their own fortune — when they put what they they own
into the service of vice and of sin. For example, betting millions of dollars
on a game while millions of people are dying from hunger or lack
of medicine or housing.

This is the misery of deciding to refrain from the love of
your neighbor and to instead love money and goods, which then become
your masters. These people refuse the free gift of love that comes from God,
and they decide to stay away from Him.

Indian Hindu devotees perform a mock cremation ritual during a procession for Maha Shivaratri, dedicated to the Hindu god Lord Shiva, in Allahabad on February 27, 2014. (Sanjay Kanojia/AFP/Getty Images)

Can you step back from your religion for a moment? I promise you won’t lose it.

Observing religion from a small distance is occasionally worth it. Sociologists who have studied religion for a century have done so while still staying believers. As we say in Colorado, “the view is worth it.” Maybe you think sociology is one of those “soft” sciences, unlike physics or the sabermetrics of baseball — but the view is worth it.

Sociology sees religion, or what they call cult (yes, same root as culture), as made up of myth and ritual. Myth is the core, primal story of the religion, and naming it as myth doesn’t mean it’s not true, rather, myth is beyond “true or false.” It’s the start of everything true and real.

Rituals are actions that embody the myth, and what I want to talk about. Ritual is a formal, repetitive pattern of behaviors that communicates, both verbally and non-verbally, the core values of a group, which allow that group to cohere and thus to survive. So ritual is about the survival of a group.

Ritual can be good or bad, in a moral sense, and it can be effective or ineffective, in a performative sense. Best example: Nazis. The Nazi Party leading up to WWII had immensely effective rituals. Watch on YouTube the Leni Riefenstahl film “Triumph of the Will,” the section on the Nuremberg Rallies. Massive torchlight parades, marching thousands, seas of banners, rapturous youth and Hitler’s spellbinding rhetoric. And we know that, at their core, these rituals effectively communicated something incredibly evil.

On the other hand, most of our religious rituals today communicate core values that are basically good (charity, justice, hospitality, compassion, etc.), but we communicate them with stunning ineffectiveness. Our rituals are flat, pallid, paltry, boring and no competition for a mobile device with “Angry Birds.” They are too ritualistic, a word connoting rote, senseless repetition and psychotic slayings.

Our lives, when we’re attentive, have things to celebrate: birth of a child, a glorious common meal, a trip to the beach, loving my own One, even good memories of those loved ones who have died. We can find those moments to be sacred, remember and enact them in effective ritual. To be effective, rituals don’t explain — they proclaim. Rituals don’t analyze — they engage and enact. Rituals use little descriptive speech, but lots of performative speech: “I baptize, I forgive, I take you as wife/husband, I take, bless, break and give this bread, I commend you to angels.” Our own lives connect to the sacred, what and who is holy.

Most contemporary rituals are missing the experience and elements of Festivity. Conscious Excess. We dress up great, drink, eat, dance, flirt too much, and make clear this is not our Ordinary Time. Think New Year’s Eve, Mardi Gras, Thanksgiving. Celebration. It’s a unique time and place, a life event to remember, it may never be this way again. Bi-Centennial of America, First on the Moon, Easter, Christmas, with a prep time like Lent and Advent getting ready for it.

Juxtaposition. Right in the face of one set of feelings, you brazenly feel or show an opposite set of feelings. In the face of loss and grief, we celebrate life. In the face of great fear, we are defiant and brave. When happiest, we weep and collapse.

Elements of festivity connect our rituals to our real lives, and what’s really going on in our families, our loves, our work, our world. What we do to and with our bodies at ritual worship mirrors our personal lives. Our religious rituals are meant to be entered into not just with our brains and beliefs, but with our whole selves. We forget that our vesture and postures are meant to engage our bodies more than our brains. Our bodies at worship probably push us further than our unsure brains want to go.

Where is your moral compass pointing? What are your social values? Hark will explore faith, morals, ethics and character at the intersection of religion ethics, culture, politics, media, science, education, economics and philosophy. At times this blog will alert readers to breaking news and trends. At times it will attempt to look more deeply into intriguing subjects. Hark means to listen attentively, and we will, as readers talk back to the news.